Tag Archives: Solaris Performance Monitoring
iostat, vmstat, netstat – Performance Monitoring & Tuning in Unix & Linux
This document is primarily written with reference to Solaris performance monitoring and tuning but these tools are available in other Unix variants & Linux also with slight syntax difference.
iostat , vmstat and netstat are three most commonly used tools for performance monitoring . These comes built in with the operating system and are easy to use .iostat stands for input output statistics and reports statistics for i/o devices such as disk drives . vmstat gives the statistics for virtual Memory and netstat gives the network statistics .
Following pages describes these tools and their usage for performance monitoring explains their syntax , examples and explanantion of results and solution for the common problems.
iostat – Input Output statistics
iostat reports terminal and disk I/O activity and CPU utilization. The first line of output is for the time period since boot & each subsequent line is for the prior interval . Kernel maintains a number of counters to keep track of the values.
iostat’s activity class options default to tdc (terminal, disk, and CPU). If any other option/s are specified, this default is completely overridden i.e. iostat -d will report only statistics about the disks.
iostat syntax
Basic synctax is iostat interval count
option – let you specify the device for which information is needed like disk , cpu or terminal. (-d , -c , -t or -tdc ) . x options gives the extended statistics .
interval – is time period in seconds between two samples . iostat 4 will give data at each 4 seconds interval.
count – is the number of times the data is needed . iostat 4 5 will give data at 4 seconds interval 5 times
iostat Example
$ iostat -xtc 5 2 extended disk statistics tty cpu disk r/s w/s Kr/s Kw/s wait actv svc_t %w %b tin tout us sy wt id sd0 2.6 3.0 20.7 22.7 0.1 0.2 59.2 6 19 0 84 3 85 11 0 sd1 4.2 1.0 33.5 8.0 0.0 0.2 47.2 2 23 sd2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 0 sd3 10.2 1.6 51.4 12.8 0.1 0.3 31.2 3 31 The fields have the following meanings: disk name of the disk r/s reads per second w/s writes per second Kr/s kilobytes read per second Kw/s kilobytes written per second wait average number of transactions waiting for service (Q length) actv average number of transactions actively being serviced (removed from the queue but not yet completed) %w percent of time there are transactions waiting for service (queue non-empty) %b percent of time the disk is busy (transactions in progress)
iostat Results and Solutions
The values to look from the iostat output are:
* Reads/writes per second (r/s , w/s)
* Percentage busy (%b)
* Service time (svc_t)
If a disk shows consistently high reads/writes along with , the percentage busy (%b) of the disks is greater than 5 percent, and the average service time (svc_t) is greater than 30 milliseconds, then one of the following action needs to be taken
- Tune the application to use disk i/o more efficiently by modifying the disk queries and using available cache facilities of application servers .
- Spread the file system of the disk on to two or more disk using disk striping feature of volume manager /disksuite etc.
- Increase the system parameter values for inode cache , ufs_ninode , which is Number of inodes to be held in memory. Inodes are cached globally (for UFS), not on a per-file system basis
- Move the file system to another faster disk /controller or replace existing disk/controller to a faster one.